Great, simple idea for Describing photos in Speaking Tests

I have just finished reading another post from the Cambridge English South East Europe Blog.

(I mentioned the tips for teaching YLE a couple of weeks ago here.)

I really liked a new tip for preparing the photo task for the Cambridge English: Preliminary exam.

Laura Casetti from Argentina submitted this tip. I thought it was great and well worth a mention on this blog.

Exam preparation idea for:
Cambridge English: Preliminary (PET), Speaking paper, Part 3

Summary:
1. Ask students to bring in a topic-related picture.
2. Divide the class into pairs and ask the students to swap pictures.
3. Ask the students to describe their partner’s picture.
4. Ask each student to describe their own picture to the class, and then explain how their partner described it.
5. Encourage the class to discuss further ideas.

Materials needed:
A picture or photo from home

Describing a personal photo
“I usually ask students to look for a picture at home, related to a given topic (usually the one we are dealing with in class), and bring it to the following class. This gives them the chance to choose a picture that, in a way, inspires them. The class works in pairs, exchanging their pictures, which, as I said before, have a topic connection.

Once they have done this, I give them a task for Part 4. After they have finished this, they are asked to tell the group how they would have described the picture they brought, and how their partner actually did this. Then, they can ask the rest of the group for further ideas.

This activity proves quite fruitful, since it allows students to open their minds to new ideas about what to say about a picture, enlarging the scope of possibilities. If this is done regularly when we finish dealing with a given topic, at the end of the course they will have a folder with their own pictures, which will be useful for revising the topics, prior to the oral interview.”

I would suggest that the same idea could be used with groups of Cambridge English: First, Advanced and Proficiency students.

With these groups, you could either ask them to bring in two related photos or they put their photos together and make pairs of photos and think of a question that could be asked in the style of the Cambridge English: First, Advanced or Proficiency photo tasks.

Useful preparation resources for Advanced Speaking

A few years ago, I subscribed to a site called Splendid Speaking.

Every week,  I received an email with a link to some resources for working on areas to develop Advanced students' speaking skills.

On the site, you can find 26 Get Speaking Task Sheets, working on different topic and functional areas. (You only get access to the Task Sheet being emailed that particular week).  You can see some of the areas covered below:

I have saved all the task sheets on my computer.
In Task 5, as well as talking about role models, the task sheet suggests a range of expressions to agree and disagree.
In Task 6, expressions for thinking out loud are considered and provided.

So, when I received an email from Splendid Speaking on Saturday telling me about a new website  for IELTS Speaking, I clicked on the link and discovered some great stuff.

In the free Weekly Vocabulary Practice, holidays and relationships have been covered so far.

And the resource that I really liked and found quite novel is the Five Minute Functions.
To date, there are two videos - Using fillers and Expressing likes and dislikes.   You can watch them on the IELTS Speaking website or on Youtube.

I would say that it's definitely a site to bookmark and revisit.

A repost of a reblog about Changes to CPE in 2013

I received an email about a post on the Cambridge ESOL South East Europe blog.

The post is reblogged from another blog (TEFL Geek) and concerns the changes that will appear in the Cambridge English: Proficiency exam as from March 2013.

http://teflgeek.net/2011/10/31/changes-to-cpe-in-2013/

The changes are very clearly explained with the help of flow charts.  You can also download a document about the changes to keep.

http://teflgeek.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/changes-to-the-cpe-2013-a-teflgeek-guide.pdf

Spain seen from two sides

After watching the news yesterday evening, I switched on the computer to take a look at the photographs that have been submitted to Antena 3, the Spanish TV news channel's website, in response to the article and the pictures that appeared in the New York Times on September 24th:

Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal

(See this and the other photos here)

One of the biggest criticism's of the photos is that they paint a very one-sided picture of Spain and they are all in black and white.

There are 150 photos on the antena3.com website.  They are all in colour - some of them are very colourful indeed.

After looking through all the photos, my teacher's brain began thinking about how I could use them in class.

One way would be to use a couple of them to illustrate ways of completing three different sentences about Spain:

1  Spain, the perfect place to ...

 (ride a bike)

2  In Spain, we still have ......

 (bubbles and smiles)

3  Visitors to Spain should see:

(Granada)

As a follow-up, students could be asked to find three images of Spain to submit to Antena 3 for the campaign (1 picture for each sentence).

And the pictures make great material for the speaking tests for Cambridge English: Preliminary, First, Advanced and Proficiency.  Either the teacher or each student/pair of students could choose a pair of related pictures and then be asked to write the intoductory rubric (and follow- up question) for the pair of photos.

For example:  (For Cambridge English: First Speaking Practice)

I'm going to give you two photographs.  Both your photos show people from different generations spending time together.  I'd like you to compare your photos and to say what things the two people in each picture can learn from each other.   You have about a minute for this.

I hope you enjoy looking at the (Antena 3) photos as much as I did, as well as reflecting on the photos from the NYT.

  

Am I making myself clear?

The other day, I came across a poster online and it got me thinking about several things.

http://www.facebook.com/HealingwithArt

From a teacher and linguist point of view, I started thinking about ambiguous sentences.

So I had a look around for sites with ambiguous sentences and came across several.

On the Fun with Words site, there is an amusing collection of ambiguous headlines, for example:

2 SISTERS REUNITED AFTER 18 YEARS AT CHECKOUT COUNTER

INCLUDE YOUR CHILDREN WHEN BAKING COOKIES

HOSPITALS ARE SUED BY 7 FOOT DOCTORS

RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE

http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguities.html

And I came across this sentence on Paul Butler's blog:

The complex houses married and single students and their families.

Most learners of English might know the word 'complex' as an adjective, but not a noun.  This is what English Profile reports about this word:

complex

 /ˈkɒm.pleks/Outline view

Word family:

Nouns: complexity

Adjectives: complex

▶ ADJECTIVE

B2 involving a lot of different but connected parts in a way that is difficult to understand

Dictionary examples:

a complex network of roads

a complex procedure

The film's plot was so complex that I couldn't follow it.

 Learner example:

It took us two weeks to modify the results in a very complex operation.

First Certificate in English; B2; Spanish

▶ NOUN

BUILDINGS

C1 a group of buildings or rooms that are used for a particular purpose

Dictionary example:

a sports/housing complex

 Learner example:

A visit to any local shopping complex suggest[s] people between 14 to 35 years of age are the [most] frequent shoppers.

International English Language Testing System; C1; Malay

MENTAL

C2 a mental problem which makes someone anxious or frightened about something

Dictionary example:

an inferiority complex

 Learner example:

He began to feel like that character in "Psycho", afraid that the hotel manager would turn out to be some kind of maniac with an Oedipus complex.

Certificate of Proficiency in English; C2; Catalan

And of course, the word 'house' is known to learners very early on, whereas the verb 'house' meaning 'to give a person or an animal a place to live' is not reported as being used by students in the Cambridge ESOL exams till C2 level.

While looking around, I learnt that such ambiguous sentences are known as garden path sentences.  Didn't know that till now!

It's like those pictures you were shown at school and asked what you saw in them, like this one:

http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-lit/ambiguity.html

Well, I hope my post today was clear and unambiguous!!!!

Learn and play!

As I write this post, my computer is playing some jazzy music to me.  Why? Because I've just been trying out Academy Island!  What exactly is that, you may ask?  It's a game!  I'll paste the description provided by Cambridge ESOL (I couldn't describe it better myself!)

What is the game about?

An unknown alien life form who landed on earth today has had to learn the English language to get by in a range of social situations... Don't panic, it's just the plot of Academy Island – a new social media game from Cambridge experts designed to help learners improve their English language ability.

Where can I find the game?

Academy Island is a free educational game aimed at English language learners. It’s available from the University of Cambridge ESOL Examination’s (Cambridge ESOL) official Facebook page – which currently has over 120,000 fans.

What do players have to do?

Players of Academy Island have to progress through different difficulty levels by helping the alien use English in a range of situations such as shopping in a bakery and visiting places such as an art gallery and library.

Who wrote the game?

A team of language experts from Cambridge ESOL who work on the actual exam papers came up with the questions and tasks to ensure they were pitched at an appropriate level for learners of English. They worked closely with TAMBA – an award-winning digital marketing agency who specialise in social media games. Players who take on the Academy Island challenge can post their scores on a global leader board through their Facebook profile.

From what I have seen (I haven't had time - yet! - to visit all the places on the Island - the language level is quite high - I would say that for students preparing for Cambridge English: First and above.

Try it out and post your results!

Recording students describing photos

Hello again!  Sorry I've been 'missing' for a few days but life has been even more hectic than usual this week!  And it hasn't been for a lack of ideas to share with you on this blog, believe me!  I have a file full of materials and lots of links saved in my 'For later' file on my computer.

So, let's make a start on one of them!

As I told you recently, I gave a talk at the TESOL Spain 2012 Convention.

As well as giving my talk, I was able to attend a few sessions.  The first one I went to a Keynote presentation given by Russell Stannard.  Here he is in action:

(Thanks Donna Koniholm for the great photos you took at the Convention!) 

I've been reading articles and tips from Russell Stannard for a long long time.  Quite deservedly, his website http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/  has won lots of awards.

For a quick (3 minute) presentation of the site by Russell himself, I recommend watching this video.

During Russell's TESOL presentation, the tool that really caught my eye was MailVU:  http://mailvu.com/.

This allows you to record video clips on a computer using the microphone and webcam and then send them to an email contact.

Here is Russell's description of the potential use of this site for language teachers:

… you can get the students to do recordings of themselves speaking in English at home … and then sending those recordings to you, you can then listen to them and obviously give them some feedback on their oral performance…

Watch Russell explaining this site here.


So, of course, me being a Cambridge ESOL teacher and teacher trainer, I thought:  What a fantastic tool to practise the 1 minute talking about photos tasks in the Cambridge English: Preliminary, First, Advanced and Proficiency Speaking Tests!!!

Let's consider how you could go about this:
For homework, tell students which photo(s) you want them to talk about and the question you want them to answer in relation to the photo(s)

For example,

Here are your photographs.  They show people spending their free time in different ways.  I'd like you to compare the photographs and say what are the advantages and disadvantages for the people of spending their free time in these different ways.  

Source:  First for Schools Handbook

You send students a link to MailVU by email.  They open the link, record themselves doing the task, and send you the clip by email.  You watch it and can give them feedback (by return of email/record a video of yourself talking about their performance/discuss the clip with them in class (maybe while you both watch the video).

I believe it has fantastic potential for working on this part of the Cambridge ESOL speaking tests!

If you try it out, please let us know about it!

As you like it:Catching Up in an Age of Global English

I was re-reading a report today of a study into the future of the English language, published in 2007.

The report, 'As You Like It: Catching Up in an Age of Global English', focuses on various issues, including the continuing fall in the number of school and university students in the UK who study a language other than their mother tongue.

The pessimistic view expressed in the report about the state of foreign language learning in the UK seems to be born out by an article in the Times Higher Education last week,  with the headline:

"Tongue-tied UK badly equipped to join in the conversation of nations"

This report contains some thought-provoking figures, for example:

There has been a general fall in the number of people applying to UK universities this year :

Much of this decrease is explained by a sharp decline in applications from older students - those in their twenties as distinct from school-leavers aged 18 among whom the application rate is down only slightly.

The biggest worry is the marked decline in languages and related studies. There has long been anxiety that the new funding arrangements would adversely affect language studies, partly because many language courses require an additional year of study and thus an additional year's worth of debt. Now we have evidence. Applications to European language courses are down by 11.2 per cent, those to non-European languages are down by 21.5 per cent: both decreases are well above the average decline across all subjects.

The writer of the article: Sir Adam Roberts, is president of the British Academy. He expresses concerns raised in As You Like It, such as: 

We Brits are at risk of becoming a nation of monoglots in a world of polyglots. 

All this contrasts starkly with the article from the ABC I referred to in a previous post. The 25,000 Spaniards contributing to the National Insurance Scheme in the UK and the 40,000 Spanish students taking a language course somewhere in the UK each year.

I found myself nodding on reading the following reflection on learning another language in an article published in the Guardian yesterday: 

the initial years of studying a language are tough: there is no escape from the grind of learning how to conjugate verbs, construct sentences and to absorb enough words to begin to understand what is written and said.

To elect to do this, young boys and girls need to know that, like practising a musical instrument, designing clothes or playing a sport, the end-result will be worthwhile. They need teachers who can inspire them, classmates who encourage them and families who understand the value of the skill. In Britain, none of this exists to a sufficient degree.

 

Let's hope our students are not reluctant to learn another language and see it as something useful!!!

If you need some arguments to convince them, there are lots in this New York Times article:

English Is Global, So Why Learn Arabic?

You could give each student or group of students one of the different views put forward by the 6 debaters - all of them coincide in the desirability for everyone to speak at least one other language.

And you can also read what the readers of the New York Times have to say on the matter.

Why not follow this up with some essay writing practice:

"Everyone should learn at least one foreign language" Why?